When I was young, I had to write everything down in a notebook or I’d forget it within an hour. Tests that were based on fact recall were the worst, I routinely failed those. Thankfully, I’m not a complete moron so I did quite well with anything I could reason out. I was forced to learn to think quickly.

Much like the invention of writing, the invention of PageRank seems to have accelerated the deterioration of memory. And that’s not so bad, because memory is imperfect. It’s far better to be able to know how to find something you should know and look it up with perfect recall. And then be able to piece that blob of information with a bunch of other blobs of information to get something new.

It frees up the brain from the menial task of digging things out of your messy memory and lets you spend more time thinking about how to combine things you don’t even know with the things you already do.

but as james garfield said: “The ideal college is (a good teacher) on one end of a log and a student on the other.”

Socrates was suspicious of literacy (it seems he was illiterate) claiming that writing things down would weaken people’s memories – and he lived at a time when education consisted of being able to recite Homer. It seems that the Internet is at the other end of this same arc. Or, perhaps not the end.

The only good thing I ever got out of education was the chance to meet some very interesting and clever people, which made me want to be clever too.
But I don’t think I was ever taught anything – I was too arrogant to be taught. All I wanted was access to data – I already knew what I wanted to find out, and knew that if I was left alone with the data for any period of time, I would get there. And the clever people inspired me to want to know the subjects that interested me as thoroughly as they knew the subjects that interested them.
What all this lacked was any desire on my part to make this quest for knowledge applicable to any profession or field. And when my education ended abruptly (due to sudden emigration) I was at a bit of a loss.

Education is this country (UK) is about more than education, as such. Having a degree is a proof of membership of the middle classes. People, 20 years ago, would spend their grants on booze, (having chosen a university on the basis of its social life) and shave a degree in English. They would then use the qualification to get an office job, and never read another book. This always seemed a total waste of 3 years to me, let alone of money, and lecturer’s time.